I have the opportunity to be one of the Google Glass Explorers and try out this new technology early. As someone who teaches information literacy skills, I’m very interested in seeing how it might or might not integrate into classroom use – whether by the professor alone, or at some point when most people have something similar. I’m trying to decide whether to take the plunge. One potential hiccup I can already foresee is that the introductory voice command appears... Read more
One element in the first season of the BBC series Sherlock that sticks close to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original is the mention of Sherlock not knowing that the Earth orbits the sun. Here’s a clip of the scene: This mention of geocentrism actually makes an important point. It is possible to be incredibly gifted in one area and completely clueless in another. And this is relevant not just to the question of whether you trust a hydraulic engineer over the... Read more
The inanity of the frequent refrain of peddlers of pseudoscience and pseudoscholarship that “Even the experts can be wrong” is perhaps best illustrated be comparison with expertise in another domain. Even professional musicians can play wrong notes. But that doesn’t make all players of instruments equal, nor does it make it equally or more likely that amateurs will get those same notes right. By way of illustration, here is Valentina Lisitsa playing one of Rachmaninov’s Etudes Tableaux: When someone asks... Read more
Here is another comment on this blog that seemed worth sharing in a post, this time from Stuart32: It’s not a question of evolution versus Christianity. If the theory of evolution is true then any objection you might have against it is also an objection against God’s way creating us. But if the theory isn’t true then any objection against the theory is also an objection against God for creating the world in such a way as to deceive so... Read more
This quotation is often attributed to Karl Barth, but it is verifiably the words of Madeleine L’Engle. Blog reader Eric Funston kindly made the image with the appropriate attribution and shared it on his blog, That Which We Have Heard and Known. Read more
Commenter Ian wrote the following, and I thought it worth sharing in a blog post: Surety is cheap. The Pharisees were sure they were right, the 9/11 terrorists were sure they were right, as they gave their lives for what they were sure of, the Nazis were sure they were right and the world would be better with the Jews exterminated. Being sure is not difficult, and it is not a sign of being right. Those who are most sure... Read more
Existential comics has a nice comic strip dealing with the philosophical issues related to teleportation and imaginary technology like the transporter on Star Trek. Click through to read the rest. Read more
Open Parachute shared the above image with a quote from David Attenborough. This illustrates well the theological objection that is raised not by atheists and agnostics in the first instance, but by liberal religious believers. And it relates not just to matters of creation but to the implications of thanking God for the good as though it were specially arranged for you, without acknowledging that there are other things in the world for which it is hard if not impossible... Read more
Jerry Coyne shared the picture below, showing how invoking a certain fictional technology from a show I enjoy could solve a very serious problem that confronts young-earth creationism: how could all those animals fit on the ark? Fans of Doctor Who will know that space arks have featured more than once on the show, from “The Ark” back in the William Hartnell era to “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” more recently in Matt Smith's time as the Doctor. The only real... Read more
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